From the virtual datacenter to the cloud

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Last year, VMware and EMC announced the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud version 2.5. This was delivered as a fully engineered solution that included products from EMC and VMware as well as some secret sauce (software bits) that provided ready to use automation and workflows for provisioning services. What this translates to for our customers, is a proven way to see almost immediate time-to-value (day 2 operations!) when implemented on a VCE Vblock. The notion of having a service catalog of hybrid services – IaaS, DBaaS, and APPaaS – only a few clicks away is no longer just aspirational. Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud enables any data center to deliver on demand/self-service hybrid cloud – which typically takes months if not a year- in less than 28 days.

Of course, we haven’t sat still since we shipped Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 last October. The combined lab teams from the Federation companies – EMC, VCE, RSA, and VMware have continued to work together to deliver a new release, announced today, as Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 3.0. This release continues to deliver a fully engineered and validated solution that includes the elements of a full software defined data center, plus we have added the ability to easily and consistently create, deploy and manage advanced multi-tier applications as well as a robust Big Data solution.

First let’s dig into the upgrades to the core Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud capabilities.

Core:

• APPaaS Support – this release goes beyond IaaS (Infrastructure), DRaaS (Disaster Recovery), and BaaS (Backup) – to now include APPaaS (Applications), which provides for simple management of the full development lifecycle for complex and custom multi-tier applications.
• Shorter Time-to-Value – deployment time has been reduced from months to under 28 days, while infrastructure provisioning time reduced 75%.
• More Platforms – as always EMC continues to add more of their storage platforms and this release gives customers some awesome choices. Included are all the latest storage devices including VMAX3, Isilon, and ScaleIO.

• Micro-segmentation and Encryption – Security is always top of mind when it comes to any IT assets and is particularly critical and we haven’t stopped making security a key objective for Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. This version now includes micro-segmentation and encryption built in. Micro-segmentation implements a granular firewall protection at the application or VM level.

VSPEX Blue Centralized Management:

• Centralized Management – For customers who have or are planning on using the VSPEX Blue platform from EMC in remote offices (ROBO) – Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 3.0 provides centralized management.

Hybrid:

• VMware vCloud Air integration – Standard as part of comes the solution – simply turn on the VMware vCloud Air cloud connector and from the same centralized management interface – control and configure and migrate workloads between on-premises private cloud and off-premises public cloud services. By uniquely providing complete interoperability to scale and a mature management toolset that works seamlessly across domains, even the most stringent security and compliance requirements can be met.

What does all this mean? Bottom line? If you had to implement all this on your own – it would take literally months to years to ‘build your own’. We’ve researched the time it would take to install, configure, and then write/test/validate all the scripts included – and it would take a small team a year+ to do. So what you get is a solution that optimizes all the installs, configurations details, and scripts written and tested by our joint engineering teams designed to be ready out of the box. Upgrades? Included. Support? Included. All you have to worry about is using the solution, not building it. Hybrid cloud? That was easy.

Today, VCE announced a major expansion to its converged infrastructure portfolio to help customers accelerate their software-defined data centers and simplify their journey to the hybrid cloud. VCE’s converged solutions continue to add additional value, as well as drive time-to-value and increase agility for customers. As a longtime partner of VCE, we congratulate them on today’s launch, and look forward to continuing to work closely with them as a part of The Federation.

IT departments continue to face pressure to keep up with the needs and demands of their businesses, with requirements for greater flexibility and agility, all while driving innovation. Through the use of the hybrid cloud, built on the software-defined data center, IT organizations are empowered to quickly and easily move workloads from the data center to the public cloud securely, and back and forth as required.

With VCE Foundations for Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, the benefits of the hybrid cloud can be realized quickly, leading to quicker time-to-value, as well as guaranteed integration and support. The solution includes factory integration of additional VMware and EMC technologies including VMware NSX network virtualization, VMware vRealize management and orchestration software, and EMC® ViPR® software-defined-storage. The solution also includes technology onramps to VMware vCloud Air, which provides organizations with seamless management, workload migration and disaster recovery between their private and public cloud environments.

Also announced today, VCE will offer a new VCE VxBlock System with VMware NSX, which provides customers with factory-based pre-integration, pre-testing and pre-validation with seamless component-level updates, ongoing lifecycle assurance, and unified single-call support. VCE VxBlock with VMware NSX will enable customers to see the same powerful agility they see in virtualized compute across the entire converged infrastructure. Read more about VMware NSX on VxBlock in Hatem Naguib’s blog here.

For more information on the VCE news today, please read the announcement here.

IT departments continue to seek tools to drive greater levels of innovation, all while meeting the evolving and urgent needs of their businesses application demands. With a hybrid cloud, IT organizations have the freedom to move application workloads from the data center to a secure public cloud — with the flexibility to transfer these application workloads back and forth as needed. With these new offerings, and a long-standing partnership, EMC and VMware continue to help our joint customers achieve greater agility with better business outcomes through hybrid cloud offerings that are trusted, as well as simple to deploy and use.

With the now available EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition with VMware solutions, customers get tight integration of EMC solutions and VMware vCloud Air, providing customers with an easy and accelerated path to automate and deliver IT as a service, within their own data centers and extending into the public cloud. This solution provides best practices for deploying a software-defined data center based private cloud on-premises while extending IT virtualization infrastructure capacity to VMware’s public cloud – vCloud Air.

VMware and EMC have also partnered to develop professional services offerings to accelerate our mutual customers’ adoption of the software-defined data center to provide timely results and benefits. Additionally, organizations can take advantage of web-based and instructor led training for the EMC Hybrid Cloud solutions.

Customers can quickly assess their current application portfolios for proper deployment in the software-defined data center for maximum usability and economic benefits. Helping our customers develop their skills to take advantage of this new technology is a major milestone in accelerating adoption and achieving maximum benefit from day 1.

To learn more about EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solutions, please check out the following resources:

“Software-defined” anything – it’s rapidly becoming a top item on every IT decision maker’s “To Do” list. The potential benefits are too significant to ignore or pass off as the latest trend. There’s not a single IT manager today who isn’t challenged by the velocity of change, the unprecedented exponential growth in data, and the near-instant demand for IT services. A Software-Defined Data Center delivers the speed, flexibility and control IT needs to support the applications of the new mobile-cloud era, as well as the legacy applications that run the business.

But for many customers, the question is not “Should we adopt a software-defined strategy” but more to the point, “How quickly can we adopt a software-defined strategy?” Faced with a variety of choices and challenged to move fast, customers need more than a “Do it Yourself” answer.

And that’s why today’s announcement by the EMC Federation of businesses — EMC Information Infrastructure (EMC II), VMware (NYSE:VMW), Pivotal and RSA. is so relevant. Today, the Federation announced the availability of the Federation Software-Defined Data Center. This solution is a combined effort of the Federation to bring best-of-breed products into a fully integrated, engineered, tested and validated solution for customers and partners. Designed to meet the needs of mission critical enterprise applications, the Federation Software-Defined Data Center will help IT managers and decision makers accelerate their transition to a Software-Defined Enterprise.

By abstracting, pooling, and automating across the infrastructure – compute, storage and networking – we have enabled an environment that can deliver IT at business speed. This solution includes a reference architecture, solutions guide, and newly developed software that automates hundreds of orchestration workflows to accelerate deployment.

This is a great option for VCE customers who are looking for the power and fast time to value of converged infrastructure. This new offering can quickly deliver and manage cloud infrastructure and application services with the control IT needs.

The VCE Integrated Solution for Cloud Management with VMware is a comprehensive foundational offering, and is a result of the longtime partnership between VCE and VMware. This solution will provide functionality and initial start up services to get an initial private cloud foundation up and running quickly using VMware management technologies. It will also give customers the option to extend to public cloud services with a unified management experience.

VMware vRealize Suite contains the products formerly known as vCloud Automation Suite, vCenter Operations Management Suite, vCenter Log Insight and IT Business Management Suite. VMware vRealize Suite integrates the capabilities of all of these solutions to deliver a powerful hybrid cloud management platform.

VMware vRealize Suite is optimized for VMware vSphere, but also works with Microsoft Hyper-V, and public clouds, such as VMware vCloud Air and Amazon Web Services, as well as those based on OpenStack. As a result, VCE customers will be able to maximize the value of their Vblock System investment.

As customers shift to managing diverse environments, the need for unified management solutions is crucial. At VMware, we are uniquely and strongly positioned to deliver this with VMware vRealize Suite.

We look forward to continuing to support organizations as they shift to managing hybrid and flexible software-defined data centers, and are proud to work closely with partners like VCE.

By Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware

The mobile cloud era (cloud, mobile, social, big data) is driving structural change across many industries. Organizations that are able to take advantage of this by delivering workloads to any device, across any cloud, on demand and securely, can gain a competitive advantage. In order to accomplish this, IT must build a hybrid cloud solution based on a software-defined datacenter.

The tectonic shifts in IT pose many great challenges for organizations, and at VMware we are proud to continue to collaborate closely with our partners, like EMC, to help solve some of the industry’s biggest IT challenges.

With today’s announcements from EMC on its Next Gen VMAX3 and XtremIO solutions, VMware continues its strong partnership with EMC as customers continue to accelerate and realize the benefits of the software-defined enterprise.

VMAX, XtremIO and VMware solutions

Today, EMC revealed a new VMAX solution, VMAX3, which is a hyper-consolidated solution that provides predictable service levels for up to tens of thousands of virtualized workloads, including file or block, and provides high levels of availability with seamless cloud access.
VMAX3 includes enhanced management support with vSphere and acceleration with VMware VAAI.

Additionally, EMC also announced new XtremIO solutions, which help organizations realize powerful performance and agility in their software-defined data centers. VMware Horizon 6 and XtremIO solutions meet at this intersection of VDI and storage — empowering a dynamic end-user experience at scale with radically simple central management across desktop, BYO and applications for IT, with low TCO.

When customers have specialized virtualized workloads in block environments, which require low latency and inline data reduction services, such as VDI, and mission critical applications and databases, XtremIO and VMware Horizon is a powerful solution. Thousands of desktops can be deployed in minutes for all kinds of users across desktop, BYOD and enterprise applications soar with incredibly fast, low-latency performance – all without compromising security or risking data loss.

Together, the combination of EMC’s new solutions with VMware infrastructure helps customers keep on top of today’s workloads and get ahead with tomorrow’s applications.

We congratulate EMC on its significant portfolio launch today, and look forward to continuing to partner as we help solve IT’s biggest challenges.

VMworld 2014 is quickly approaching, and you can learn more about how EMC and VMware are working together at many of the sessions available at the event. The VMworld session scheduler is live at the following link – here you can search for sessions where you can learn more about joint solutions with EMC. We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco, Aug. 24-28.

In a previous post, I painted a picture of a new world in which CIOs act as service brokers, figuring out the best way for them to deploy services, whether internally or externally. In this new world, the CIO essentially oversees a “rental market,” in which services aren’t bought with expensive capital outlays, but rented with operational budget. Such a scenario begs the question of what impact such a “rental market” has on the way IT delivers technology.

The first thing the CIO needs to do is get “rogue IT” – the scenario in which line of business personnel are going to SaaS vendors or Amazon Web Services (AWS), whipping out a credit card, and setting up computing services without IT’s knowledge – under control. “Rogue” describes this behavior perfectly, because end-running the IT organization has integration, security, and compliance implications that at the end of day translate into business risk. CIOs need to make their business partners understand that IT has to be the gateway to ensure privacy and quality and compliance. But CIOs themselves need to understand that in the cloud era IT’s monopoly on offering IT services is over.

Even though you might be able to offer the same service, IT must recognize that in some cases – say, for cost or time to market reasons – it might be better to procure a service from a partner rather than to build it and manage it internally. Your job is to manage the contracts, taking responsibility for the technical and enterprise issues you’re responsible for. In a world where third-party services will play an increasingly important role, this critical management function is the key shift from rogue IT.

In this scenario, IT becomes a strategic sourcer of technology – essentially a facilitator or broker to help the business get applications up and running quickly while still maintaining its crucial role for security and compliance. This requires IT to beef up its muscles in disciplines such as contract management and governance beyond risk and compliance. It may also require that IT figure out how to retroactively apply controls to applications that the LOBs have already brought in. And there are probably more of them than you think. When VMware’s IT department went through this process, it initially thought we had approximately 20 SaaS applications – it discovered about 70.

A New Model for IT

There are no traditions for this new rental market. It’s like the wild, wild west. It will involve new roles and new structures, new relationships between LOBs and IT. I’ve seen some customers spin out their IT group and rent services back to the company – kind of like outsourcing, except there is no independent outsourcing vendor. It’s the spin-off’s responsibility to deliver services in the most cost-effective way possible, whether that’s through internal IT, outsourced IT or SaaS options.

LOBs benefit from these new arrangements. Before, they were essentially taxed for IT, paying up to 20 percent of their budget for shared services such as IT and human resources, without any clear visibility as to what they were getting for their money. In this rental market, where IT is constantly in competition with cloud providers, IT has to provide better transparency as to the true cost of its services to enable comparison with externally sourced services. In addition, as IT’s customers increasingly come to expect a consumption-based pricing model, metering is needed to demonstrate actual usage by the LOBs. The result of this greater transparency is greater efficiency all around.

That level of transparency may sound highly unorthodox to some CIOs, but consider the case if you were running IT like a business with your own P&L, as opposed to a best guess allocation of costs to your customers. Some of your services could be revenue generating, for example, by providing hosting to other companies, even those that might be considered competitors. A few banks I have visited in EMEA and Australia have been offering such services to smaller banks for years; the smaller banks save money and the bigger one has a revenue stream. In fact, I’m seeing this strategy adopted across industries and regions. It’s a powerful driver of greater IT efficiency and agility. Reason is, when IT sells its services externally, competitive pressures ensure it must deliver new services faster and provide value more cost-effectively.

Implementing a New 80/20 Rule

Transparency is what you need to adapt successfully to the new model for delivery of IT services. Cloud – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS – is fundamentally changing service delivery. It’s now more about an order-to build service model as opposed to a lengthy and costly build-to-order. Rather than wait for the LOB to request a service then build it out, IT organizations are creating pre-defined catalogs of services for each type of user or common request. When the LOB orders something from the catalog, it’s instantly provisioned on demand.

So where does transparency fit in? Without transparency into the costs and actual usage of your services you cannot make fact-based decisions on whether to source your services internally or from the external rental market. To compete cost-effectively with cloud providers you need to implement the 80/20 rule – standardize your service offerings so that your catalog addresses 80% of your workload needs.

More and more, I see companies instituting a new position of cloud operator or administrator, which acts like an IT product “service” manager to the line of business. Regardless of the title, this important role is tasked with making decisions about what types of services are needed, which ones to offer in the catalog and where they’re sourced or hosted. The decision may be to source the service internally, or, if it’s just a pilot project, the admin may create a short-term AWS account. It’ll be that person’s job to determine the best strategy. With such a system in place, it’s easy for IT to direct special attention to the 20 percent of business demand that still needs customized services.

As you standardize and automate services that represent 80 percent of your requests, they begin to take up less time and effort. You free up more money to invest in customization where it can help the business. Don’t do it just to save money – think about it as a reinvestment effort. Eventually, you can spend 20 percent of your time on tactical issues and 80 percent of your time on strategic issues. You may not ever get to those actual numbers, but that’s not a bad goal.

The upshot: IT gets more efficient, and the business gets better service.

Ramin Sayar is senior vice president and general manager of VMware. He blogs regularly about the ongoing challenges customers face in a changing IT world.

Today at EMC World, EMC announced ViPR, a new open storage platform that enables the abstraction of the storage layer into a single pool of virtual storage within a software-defined data center. ViPR will easily integrate with VMware-based environments, and will enable organizations to centrally access and manage EMC and heterogeneous physical storage infrastructure.

By extending the benefits of the software-defined datacenter to storage, customers will be able to use their existing VMware infrastructure with ViPR to drive greater value, automation and simplicity out of their existing storage solutions.

At VMware, our mission is to extend the benefits of virtualization to all areas of the data center — beyond compute to security, networking, management and storage. With the help of our strategic partners, such as EMC, we can help customers realize greater efficiency, flexibility and agility in their IT infrastructure through a software-defined data center architecture.

Please see the EMC news release for further details on this announcement, and also a blog post on the news from Amitabh Srivastava, President, EMC Advanced Software Division.

In my last blog post, I talked about shifting from infrastructure to innovation. Innovation has always been a key goal of IT, but the pathway to achieving it has never been easy. The cloud has made it easier, but you need a solid foundation on which to build innovation.

Here are five key steps toward building that pathway, best handled in sequence.

Focus on What’s Important. This goes back to the age-old idea of alignment; that is, how can IT best serve the business? Let’s assume you and your business colleagues have worked out the portfolio of services you need to deliver to help the business meet its objectives (of course, that’s a whole separate discussion in itself). The next question is, how should you deliver them? Is it with internal resources or through a third-party service provider? Most CIOs believe that their IT department can handle anything the business can throw at them. But even if it can, should it? Leave ego out of the equation. You should reserve the skills of your IT team for the most mission-critical needs, and outsource or co-source what’s less important.

Rely on Standardization. Standardization is king. Flexibility and choice are nice, but following the 80/20 rule will reduce costs while still delivering sufficient capability for the needs of the great majority of your business partners. Standardize and enable self-service for 80% of the common requests/requirements. Outsource them to the cloud if it makes sense (and not just financially – compliance and security are vital as well). Then leverage your team resources in shared services or infrastructure teams to do the heavy automation and lifting for the custom 20% of projects.

Calculate Your Baseline. To make informed sourcing decisions you have to develop a sound formula for calculating your service costs. Educated guesses and gut feel no longer cut it. You can achieve this through IT financial management tools that automate the capture of your costs (no more spreadsheets!) and allocate them to specific services. Next, compare your baseline to the competition – benchmarking shows how you stack up against your peers and cloud service providers (and how you’re improving over time). These capabilities are all about confidently making the right sourcing and investment decisions for IT and the business.

It’s All About the Data. No matter where your information lives – on-premise or in the cloud – there’s got to be an easy way to send it back and forth. If you don’t make it easy, you’ll be creating your own bottlenecks. And make sure you develop a cast-iron governance strategy. Just because you don’t control the data in-house doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for it. The flexibility of the cloud bestows great power, and with great power comes great responsibility.

Strive for Visibility and Transparency. I talk to many CIOs who have a definitive mandate: reduce your budget either by real dollars or percentage costs. To do this you need transparency. Think about how you can create a “bill of IT” that clearly states not just what your services cost but who is consuming them. Leverage metering and reporting capabilities to empower a fact-based discussion with your business stakeholders, with showback or even chargeback. This will help you and your business counterparts make better decisions and drive down costs. Use transparency to prove your efficiency – remember, you must be able to show the payoff.

Here’s my recommendation: establish a small, greenfield private cloud deployment for a key line of business and expand from there. Track everything, from costs to ultimate benefits. Show how your investment paid off – that is, how your foundation for innovation enables you to invest limited funds wisely and generate the projected payoff.

Demonstrate that you’ve mastered your costs, targeted business problems, and delivered business value. You’ll have not only created the pathway to innovation, but ratcheted up your reputation within the company.

In my conversations with CIOs and other IT executives, I often hear how their teams are focused on maintaining a solid, reliable infrastructure. Their priorities are continuity of service, meeting SLAs, and minimizing disruptions and downtime. That’s an important, admirable goal, but as every IT exec now knows it’s not the whole picture.

If your teams spend too much energy on maintenance to ensure things don’t go wrong, they’re probably going to miss the opportunity for moving forward – and the threat of being left behind. Consumerization of IT and the cloud have changed everything. As one customer exec pointed out to me recently, “Public cloud options can be the pink slip for IT infrastructure and operations teams.” Let’s face it, the monopoly is over. Public cloud services, both consumer and business, have set a new standard for IT service delivery – ease of access, speed, reliability, etc. – as well as expectations on price, and IT teams are expected to match or better that standard if they want to stay in the game.

With so much available today on demand in the cloud there’s greater pressure than ever on IT to somehow reduce expense and shift Keeping the Lights On to new, innovative projects that drive business productivity and profit growth. You need to empower your teams to think and act differently, enabling them to be a world class IT organization.

Your teams can no longer focus on the infrastructure; they have to focus on taking advantage of the infrastructure to deliver new business value through innovation. In a world of options – private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, virtualized and physical infrastructures – the focus needs to be on making the right choice that’s right for your business.

The question is no longer “How do I make my infrastructure the best it can be?” but: “What’s the best infrastructure for what we want to do?” IT has to decide the most logical place to provision and operate infrastructure and applications, based on criteria such as cost, risk, compliance, security, etc. That’s where the innovation comes in – what works best where? What capabilities can I start to deliver as services? What cloud services can I take advantage of to help drive what the business is trying to achieve?

That’s the shift we’re seeing in IT. Instead of providing a super reliable infrastructure to support your applications, you’ll be sourcing and providing services. As I mentioned in my previous post, IT will become a broker for services that the business needs, with a fact-based approach to identifying the best source of those services, internally or externally. Being a service broker will help your teams shift toward innovation, while matching or bettering the standard set by public cloud services.

Some of those services – the ones supporting your mission-critical activities – will stay on-premise for reasons of security and compliance. Some of them – the utility part – you’ll offload to a cloud infrastructure provider through IaaS. The rest of them – the part in the middle – you’ll offload to a SaaS or PaaS vendor (someday these may come back in house or they may stay in the cloud or even move back and forth depending on cost and changing business demand).

Being an innovative IT organization is about trying new things. About being daring. About making decisions faster, killing projects sooner, investing more in projects that warrant it. And about how the cloud – private, public, hybrid – can help you do that.

This is going to take a mind-shift on the part of your teams and a critical look at your processes. You’re going to have to be more customer-centric and deliver cost transparency to your stakeholders. You’re going to have to standardize the services you offer (think 80/20 rule) and enable self-service access to them. And you’re going to have to put the right governance processes in place – who gets access to what and where does your data live.

In my next post I’ll walk through how you can tackle these challenges.

Care to comment on this blog post? Share your thoughts your thoughts with us in comment section.